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I had only met Dean a couple times when he asked me to go. We were sitting in Buxton Hall, a whole hog barbecue spot in Asheville, North Carolina. Maybe there was fog leaping up from the Appalachian peaks in the windows. Maybe not. I remember the mountains as though they were always exhaling clouds - ancient women with quilts and temperate pipes that constantly burned blue. Dean had fixed up an old BMW and quit his job. My Jeep had just coughed the last of its clouds out into the valley. I was broke. Flat broke. Flat as the land back home in Eastern Virginia. "Just come." He said. "It'll cost me the same if you're in the car or not, and I could use the company. I'll help you out with food." I quit my job and spent the rest of the night packing. He picked me up at dawn and we rocketed north, stopping in Richmond and then Tidewater to visit my friends and jump in the Rappahannock. It was early April. The water at night was cold, and pale green galaxies of bioluminescent algae swirled out from my flailing arms. The next day, DC. Then North. The driver's side door and window were jammed, so every toll booth found me jumping out, running around the front of the car, shoving cash into the hands of bewildered attendants, and running back. There are a lot of toll booths on the New Jersey Turnpike. A lot. In New York, we went to the 9/11 Memorial where the earth was opened and years just poured and poured and poured into the dark. Then we went to Boston. We decided to camp in a Connecticut forest where there were no sounds but the creaking of bare trees. There were no animals. No insects. Just pale, aching woods. We didn't actually sleep that night. Pennsylvania. Ohio. A cheap Indianapolis motel with real beds and an ageing flat screen television. We ate barbecue tacos and drank local beer. We showered and slept, the montage of dollar menus and headlight-shaped highways lifting like fumes from our crumpled bodies. In Arkansas, the Buffalo River was the color of jungles in the rain and we camped around a fire we built with green saplings. In St. Louis, the ribs at Pappy's Smokehouse were purple with fruit wood and dissolved like clouds in a festival of dry rub and sauce. You begin to understand where riverboat music came from with food like that. In Kansas we crashed with a barbecue pitmaster. He made us burnt ends which he called "meat candy" and showed us all his guns. The road to Denver is long and straight enough for things to catch up with you. *Maybe this was a mistake.* It rises almost imperceptibly across 603 miles. *What am I going to do if my relationship is over? We're about to get married. Maybe I could have fixed it if I stayed. Maybe that job wasn't that bad. Maybe...* The high plains have a way of showing you to yourself. No embellishment. No distractions. Just the vast, empty longing of a strange land. Just the blunt reflection of all the things Americans have been traveling this way to outrun since the 1850's. In the Rocky Mountain National Park we put hammocks up and looked out over a rippling golden valley, the ridge across belted with evergreens and crowned in white. Congregations of elk bowed in the sunset stretching between. Outside of Cheyenne the night is pure black. Darkness is a presence. It gathers around parking lot lights and tries to squeeze them out like the palm of a ghost folding around a match it can never grasp. In Reno, Dean won money. In California, I won something else. First San Francisco. Vesuvio Cafe, with its lacquer and hush, where Kerouac drank and I started calling my companion "Dean". Then the Redwoods. Their ancient baritone drone at the sky. Their constant mantra of breath. Their towering, untouchable peace. This had not been a mistake. And for the first time, I believed nothing ever had been.